Frosted Whiteface vs Chalk-fronted Corporal

At Day Brook Pond the other day, I caught this Frosted Whiteface dragonfly, and a Chalk-fronted Corporal alternating between two perches on the same Birch twigs over the water. I wanted to get them in the same image, as the comparison is interesting…especially the size comparison. I think of the Corporal as being a small dragonfly, but it is huge when compared to the delicate Whiteface.

While it would have made an excellent shot, the Whiteface’s twig was maybe 6 inches in front of the Corporal’s twig, and, though I attempted it, there was no way to get them in focus at the same time. So I took two shots, one focused on the Whiteface and the second on the Corporal, thinking that maybe I could merge them when I got home. I am working on the iPad and I used three apps for this composition. First I processed the shots identically for light and detail in Polarr, using my “birds” preset. Then I took both shots into Adobe PhotoShop Mix as layers, and cut out the blurred Whiteface to expose the sharp one on the layer behind. That left a visible margin between the two images where the background did not match perfectly, so I saved the combined image and reopened it in Polarr. There I was able to smooth the edges of the join using the Brush and the Blur control. I saved that. In looking at it however, I decided that I had cropped the Whitetail a little too close to the edge. I opened the image in HandyPhoto which has a Magic Uncrop tool, and used it to add some real estate to the left of the Whiteface. In HandyPhoto is just a matter of extending the frame and the program fills it in with cloned background.

And there you have it. A digitally created, true to life, comparison of a Frosted Whiteface and a Chalk-fronted Corporal dragonfly.